Anna J. Engler
אַ שײנער טאָג, אַ פֿרילינגס טאָג,
װאַכט אױף אין מײַן זיכרון,
א שײנער טאָג, אַ גאָלדענער,
פֿון מײַנע קינדער-יאָרן.
איך שטיף אין אונדזער גערטעלע,
די װײַנשל-בײמער בליען,
עס פֿלאַמען מײַנע בעקעלעך,
די אײגעלעך, זײ גליען.
עס זאָגט מיר אָן די מאַמעשי,
איך זאָל זיך נישט פֿאַרגעסן,
װי נאָר די זון װעט אונטערגײן,
דאַן זאָל איך קומען עסן.
דער טאָטע הערט זיך אײַן און קװעלט,
און גיט דערבײַ אַ שמײכל,
און זאָגט מיר אָן: – למען השם,
פֿאַרקריך נישט װוײַט צום טײַכל
– Jacob Adler
Memories
A spring day, a pretty one,
Awakens in my memory,
A beautiful day, a golden one,
From my childhood years.
I run in our little garden,
Where the sour cherry trees are in blossom.
My small cheeks are ruddy,
My bright eyes, they shine.
My beloved mother tells me
I should not forget
As soon as the sun sets
To come in and eat.
My father is listening, looking at me with pride
He flashes a bright smile,
And tells me
To not go past the river.
–Translated from Yiddish by Anna J. Engler
A Beautiful Day
A spring day, a beautiful one,
Awakens in my memory,
A pretty day, a golden one,
From my childhood years,
I race quickly through our small garden,
And the sour cherry trees are blooming.
My cheeks are blossom pink,
My eyes are lit by flowers.
My mother tells me
I shouldn’t forget
As soon as the sun meets the horizon
I should come and eat.
My father listens, his loving gaze on me
He flashes a bright smile,
He reminds me softly
To not go down past the river.
–Translated from Yiddish by Anna J. Engler
Assimilation
(An erasure of my interview with Hillary Engler)
I grew up just speaking
English.
With people who just spoke
English.
My Jewish ancestors would’ve had a knowledge with Hebrew,
but as a prayer language, not a modern language.
I should learn Yiddish.
because they were Jews they would have spoken Yiddish as well as the languages around them like
Hungarian –
Russian –
Lithuanian –
Yiddish is
our history –
cultural ethnic identity –
many generations back it wasn’t gone
and it’s kind of sad, that there was this whole language that was around for a long time
there’s history and literature in Yiddish, and it’s dying out
the double-edged side of assimilation
now we’re just boring Americans who only speak English
kind of a bummer
I think it’s more common in other countries to be multilingual
I thought about speaking in Spanish or Hebrew to you when you were a baby, but
Mama doesn’t know those.
it wasn’t a forced assimilation
but it was part of what marked Jews as
other
and for my ancestors, not speaking the language of the old country was desirable
kids being embarrassed by their parents who sounded foreign, or
other.
But it’s not close to my own experience.
the Nazis eliminated a lot of Yiddish speaking people.
some Christians were prejudiced against Yiddish.
Both some non-Jews and Jews had negative associations with Yiddish.
Yiddish was the common language of those Ashkenazi Jews
I know there’s some interest in Yiddish language revival.
Sorry, I feel kind of boring. I’m an assimilated American.
I’m not sad about being American, but
I’m sad for the swift downfall and erosion of a great culture and literature, and knowing
that I don’t have access to something that
just a few generations back,
virtually all of my ancestors did……y’know, the ones who weren’t killed by the Nazis.
–Anna Engler
Translator’s Statement
Jacob Adler was a poet and playwright born in 1874, He died in 1974 (Wikipedia Contributors), which makes him a centenarian, but that’s not the only interesting thing about him – by far! Adler was born in Poland and studied in Jewish religious schools until he was fifteen, when he immigrated to the U.S. and began working in a sweatshop and advocating for Socialism (Felipa). He likely came to America because of the antisemitism in Europe at the time. He originally came to Connecticut (“Jacob Adler”) and was a tailor’s apprentice, and he migrated to New York, then Florida, which was where he died. Over the course of his life, he wrote publications under various pen names to no less than 54 different newspapers and magazines (“Congress for Jewish Culture”). Those publications included poetry, humorous articles and such, short stories, and other sketches. He also wrote 12 books and many plays, and also acted in them, which is where the whole thespian thing comes in. (Wikipedia Contributors) His poetry was often Socialist or humorous, but usually, it was relating to nostalgia for the “old country” or his childhood. A number of his poems are idylls, which are generally rustic, short and pastoral, and also include nods to how lovely the past and nature is - including this poem.
This poem “A sheyner tog” or, “A beautiful day,” was published in 1930 in a collection, and was set to music by someone who was not Adler. The poem was also published under the title “Zikhroynes,” or, “Memories” (“A Sheyner Tog”). It is one of Adler’s idylls about how good childhood was. It's a free verse poem, with four short stanzas, and every stanza has four lines. There is an ACBC rhyme scheme in the original Yiddish, and there aren’t any alliterations that I could pick up on. He reminisces fondly upon his parents and his childhood home when the cherry trees were in bloom.
The first piece of translation that I did for my poem was easier than I thought it would be, and that is due in much part to Jessica Kirzane, who mentored me for my literal translation. I had a lot of fun with it, especially because I enjoyed the poem and I enjoy poetry. After creating my literal translation, I chose two different features of the original poem to communicate. In one poem, I focused on nostalgia. The poem actually leans towards this aspect already, so I focused on preserving those aspects and highlighting them by keeping more of the literal translation. In the second, I focused on the aspects of nature in the poem and how that creates an atmosphere, like taking lines like “My cheeks are flaming,” and turning them into “My cheeks are pink like its most vibrant flowers,”. The literal translation already has a soft, nostalgic, and poetic air to it, so I was just focused on keeping it that way and adding what I thought was necessary. Through this, I also learned more about how to create what I felt was a “good” or “loyal” translation. I learned that to me, this doesn’t have a fixed definition, and is based on what the poem needs to be communicated clearly. This quote from the article “Finding Hajar” sums up my thoughts about what an ‘accurate’ translation is: “I learned early on that a literal translation did not guarantee a loyal translation” (“Sofia Rehman”). In my translations, I was struggling with the very last line of the poem, because I felt that its rhythm didn’t match the rest of either translation. The literal last line is this: “Don’t go as far as the river.” And while I understand that it’s important to keep that meaning there, in the nature-focused one, it didn’t feel right. So I played around until I ended up with this: “To not go down past the river,” because I felt it communicated his father’s request better. I didn’t keep the exact meaning, but I kept the same underlying message – to not go into or past the river, and I also got to add some poeticism in there.
I used this poeticism because I occasionally twisted the meanings of sentences to create my new meaning, which feels similar to this quote from an article about creating a language based on African use of French - “we create words from our own realities, and then they spread”. (Peltier et al.) It feels so similar because it felt like I was working with the literal translation like clay – I would squish it around until it was just how I wanted. I really enjoyed creating both poems, and I also enjoyed the new challenges they posed to me as a reader, a writer, and a newly minted translator. I also got to learn more with my mentor about Yiddish and look into how my ancestors would have used it. She even helped me learn a bit about how Yiddish functions, and even how to read it! It also pushed me into wanting to learn more about Yiddish. I don’t know if I’ll keep translating it, but I’d love to take a class on how to read, speak and understand it.
I also made an erasure poem out of my interview with my mother. Interviewing my mother was an experience that felt very different than most of our conversations. This time, we had specific questions that needed to be answered, and while that was a little awkward at times, it made it easy to talk together. It was also interesting to write exactly what she said. I also learned more about our history. From her, I learned a lot about how our family was from Hungary and came to the U.S. and assimilated. I got to hear about her interactions with Yiddish. I also learned that asking extra questions doesn’t need to happen, all that needs to happen is a couple of nudges for someone to keep talking.
I also used this text I gathered to make an erasure poem. I used a similar process that I did for my poetry when I created my erasure poem. An erasure poem is where you pick certain parts of the text and squish them into a poem. It can also be like a blackout poem, where you just keep specific phrases. The question we followed and I used as inspiration in my poem was this: “What is your relationship with your heritage language(s)?” I listened carefully to my mother when she answered so I could later highlight the most important parts of the discussion to her, and so I could make the choice to cut out other things unrelated to the topic. I chose each word I wanted carefully, because my poem is about assimilation, and assimilation is about conforming. I chose to give the poem an almost stilted free verse read, spacing words out and adding em-dashes and other punctuation in order for it to have a meter that could be interpreted many different ways. It could be read very slowly, or like other poems, because it’s intended to be malleable to represent how my ancestors made themselves malleable in order to fit in. I chose assimilation as my topic because my family spoke these heritage languages a long time ago, and now, our family is very American.
Works Cited
“A Sheyner Tog – the Yosl and Chana Mlotek Yiddish Song Collection at the Workers Circle.” Yiddishsongs.org, 2023, yiddishsongs.org/a-sheyner-tog/. Accessed 1 June 2025.
“Adler, Jacob (Yankev) — the Congress for Jewish Culture.” Congressforjewishculture.org, 2025, congressforjewishculture.org/people/7066/Adler-Jacob-Yankev. Accessed 1 June 2025.
Felipa. “Mudcat Café Message #4101003.” Mudcat.org, 2025, mudcat.org/detail_pf.cfm?messages__Message_ID=4101003. Accessed 1 June 2025.
Peltier, Elian, et al. “How Africans Are Changing French — One Joke, Rap and Book at a Time.” The New York Times, 12 Dec. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/12/12/world/africa/africa-french-language.html.
Rehman, Sofia. "Finding Hajar." Violent Phenomena: 21 essays on translation, edited by Kavita Bhanot, Jeremy Tiang, pp. 120-133.
Wikipedia Contributors. “Jacob Adler (Writer).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 24 Mar. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Adler_(writer).